A Better World

CHAPTER 19

The sun was setting, and it made no difference at all.

Heavy clouds quilted the world as Ethan turned off the Honda. For a moment they sat in silence, just the ticking of the engine and the quiet rasp of Violet’s breathing in the backseat. The parking lot was half full; he wouldn’t have guessed that Thanksgiving was a big day for church, but it seemed the good people of Independence felt differently. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the holiday; maybe it had more to do with what was happening to the world.

He looked over at Amy. “Zombie apocalypse?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said, and opened the car door.

Independence Presbyterian was a funky A-frame shingled in brown, with an old-fashioned spire rising from one side. Located just off the square of the quiet suburb—Independence called itself a town, but seriously, come on—it seemed a good place to leave the CRV. Who messed with cars in a church parking lot?

Ethan’s best guess was that if the government wanted to quarantine Cleveland, they would use the highways as rough boundaries. I-80 was ten miles south, but since he didn’t know exactly where the cordon would start, it was boots and backpacks from here. Twenty-two miles, much of it through national park land, with Cuyahoga Falls as the promised land.

Now there’s a phrase that may never have been uttered.

Ethan shouldered the backpack and cinched the waistband tight to distribute the weight. Muscle memory gave him a flash of strolling through Amsterdam, bicycles and cobblestones, the sun glinting off canals four thousand miles and a million years away. He tucked the pistol into his belt.

Violet was awake, the straps of her car seat tight across her little round chest. “Hello, my love. Want to go on an adventure?” If she had any feelings about the idea, she kept them to herself. Ethan hoisted her out. For a moment he held her to his chest, the sweet weight of her, the steady breathing and milk smell, and when he slipped her into the carrier Amy wore, her absence made him colder.

He and his wife looked at one another. Her smile was taut, as if she were trying to convince herself. Ethan stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, around both his girls, Violet the center of their sandwich, and for a moment they stood and breathed.

It would be dark soon.

“Let’s go.”

Hand in hand, they started walking.

Twenty minutes later, they left the road.

A dense forest of pine trees backed up to a row of two-story houses, their neatly mown lawns tapering into dirt and soft needles. He led his family along that terminator, skirting the edge of backyards. The sky’s bruised glow made silhouettes of the houses. He saw candles inside some of them, could imagine families huddling around fireplaces. The temperature was falling, but the effort of humping the pack kept him warm.

“Twenty-two miles,” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“A little stroll.”

“Not even a marathon.”

A high privacy fence on one of the properties forced them farther into the forest. He walked ahead. The trees were dark geometries against the fading light. The needles stuck to his down jacket, and a sap smell rose. They walked in silence, just the sounds of their footfalls and the susurrus of branches swaying in the wind.

When it grew too dark to see, he took out the flashlight. The stark light blanched the trees. He cupped his hand around the head of it to muffle the beam, fingers glowing Halloween red.

A shift in the wind brought a distant siren’s wail. Nightfall would have made the riots worse. He could imagine cars burning on Lakeside Avenue, the smell of scorched rubber and the crash of shattering windows and the screams of the wounded.

The forest grew denser. Ethan bushwhacked through pine boughs, holding them for Amy and Violet to walk past before he let them snap back. He relied on the compass to keep them heading south. It would have been easier to follow the line of houses, but with tensions running so high, he was afraid someone might take a shot at people creeping their backyard.

Violet woke with a cry, not loud, but startling. Amy rubbed her back through the carrier, whispered, “Shh, it’s okay, go back to sleep,” but instead his daughter sucked in a breath and released it as a howl.

“She needs a change,” Amy said.

Ethan unslung his pack, then spread out his jacket as a changing table. “Come here, little one.”

Amy held the flashlight while he swapped the diapers. Violet’s poop was the color and texture of mustard, and smellier than usual from the condensed milk. She gurgled as he worked.

When he finished, he straightened, let his daughter lie on her back and kick. Funny, all he knew about evolution and the life cycle, and he had still been caught unprepared by the reality. It was one thing to know academically that it took years for the brain and body to develop, and another to witness the slow progress of her eyes focusing, her muscles gaining control. He felt sometimes like a gym teacher substitute-teaching a biology class; he was reading the same book as his pupil, and only about a week ahead.

Amy had a hand planted against her lower back to stretch. The flashlight beam wobbled as she moved, a tiny circle of light surrounded by crushing darkness. “How far do you think we’ve come?”

“A mile and a half, two, maybe. Are you getting tired?”

“No. It’s just we’re going so slow.”

“Better to be safe.”

“I suppose.” She shrugged, then smiled at him. “Hey, something I meant to say earlier.”

“What’s that?”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

An hour later, as he looked over his shoulder to check on his girls, something grabbed Ethan’s foot. He stumbled, yanked, tried to bring his other leg forward in time, but the weight of the pack threw him off. He fell, and his knee slammed into a rock. The flashlight skittered off into the woods.

“Ethan!”

“I’m okay,” he said between gritted teeth. He cursed, sucked in a breath, cursed again. His fingers explored his knee, every touch sending a zing, though the bulk of the pain was already receding to a hard ache. It didn’t feel like his jeans had been torn, but he couldn’t be sure in the dark—oh shit.

“The flashlight. Where did it go?”

“Oh shit.” Amy was just a dark shape amidst darkness as she shuffled around, kicking at the needles with her feet. After a moment he heard the sound of the metal body off her shoe, and she bent down, then sighed.

“Broken?”

“Looks like. How about you?”

“Just banged up.” He planted a hand and rose slowly.

“Can you walk?”

He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see him. “Yes.” Ethan looked around, saw nothing but shades of black. The sky was only slightly brighter, the thick clouds hiding the moon and stars. “But I don’t think we can keep going this way.”

“We could camp here, start again in the morning.”

“It will be easier to sneak past the cordon in the dark.”

“So.”

“So.”

The office park was squat and bland. After the quiet isolation of the forest, it seemed alien and surreal, as though the world had been abandoned. The whole zombie apocalypse metaphor was starting to get to him.

Still, it had a broad drive they could follow easily, and though his knee twanged a bit, it felt good to move at a normal pace. He shrugged to shift the weight of the backpack and led the way.

They found themselves on an east-west street, three lanes and no cars. He flicked the lighter and held it as close to the old-fashioned paper map as he dared.

“I think we’re here,” he said. “Pleasant Valley Road.” There was no valley, and it didn’t strike him as all that pleasant. He found himself wanting to zoom in and switch to satellite mode. When he’d been a kid, he’d known the phone numbers of all of his friends, could dial them from memory; now, thanks to d-pads and mobiles, he barely remembered his own number and hadn’t navigated on anything but an interactive GPS display in a decade. Technology made life so much simpler.

Yeah. Tell that to Cleveland.

Amy said, “It looks more populated to the west.”

“Right. East it is. Then we can pick up . . . this one, Riverview.” The street was illustrated with the thinnest line and ran a meandering course through the national park. It changed names a few times but led more or less directly into Cuyahoga Falls.

They set off down the middle of the lonely street.

It was almost nine when they saw the first of the others.

Sweat soaked his back, and his hips had started to burn. Twenty-two miles was a day’s march for a soldier, a reasonable hike for an experienced backpacker. But working as a research scientist didn’t offer much in the way of physical conditioning. Both he and Amy hit the gym when they could, but since Violet’s arrival, that had meant a half an hour snatched here and there.

At least they were making better time. Riverview Road turned out to be a narrow two-lane stretch of cracked blacktop with fields on one side and forest on the other. Skeletal towers strung power lines along the west side, and they passed the occasional rural driveway, just a mailbox and a dirt path.

Ethan was looking at his feet—not counting steps so much as feeling the rhythm of them like a drumbeat—when Amy put a hand on his shoulder.

Something white bobbed ahead of them, and by the time he’d realized it was a flashlight, the beam had splashed over them. It was maybe forty yards ahead, and all he could see was the pinpoint of light itself. A heaviness sank through him.

“Ethan—”

“No sudden moves,” he said. Slowly he extended his arms and turned them palm up, remembering the nervous teenager behind the gun turret on the Humvee. Caught is bad, but panicking them is worse.

As suddenly as it had hit, the light flicked away. It whirled in an arc that threw strange shadows off the trees until it pointed at the chest of a man. The barrel of a rifle stuck up above one shoulder, but he was dressed in hunter’s flannels, and beside him were two other figures: a woman and a boy of eight or so.

The light lingered for a moment, and then it swung forward and once again began to bob, heading away. Ethan released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“They’re like us,” Amy said. “Trying to leave.”

Ethan nodded. They started walking again themselves, following the will-o’-the-wisp of the flashlight. “I wonder how many other people have the same idea?”

An hour later, there were dozens. Each group walked apart from the others, strung along the road like beads on a necklace. Most had flashlights and made no effort to conceal them. Some talked. Up ahead, someone sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

“I love that song,” Amy said.

“I know.”

“Kinda fitting, huh?” She broke into soft song. “We two have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine; but we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since auld lang syne.”

“My feet are weary,” he acknowledged.

They were passing a development suburb, one of those strange neighborhoods in a box plunked down in the middle of nowhere. A dozen houses were under construction, the steepled framework dark against the sky. There was a sign by the entrance he could just make out: THE BEST OF NATURE WITH THE MOST MODERN CONVENIENCES. DREAM HOMES STARTING IN THE LOW THREE HUNDREDS! Next to it was a completed model home, and Ethan saw a man standing on the front porch, watching the slow trail of refugees. He nodded at the guy but got no response. Out in the woods, a bird shrieked. The sound was unmistakably predatory, and Ethan wondered what had just died. A mouse, maybe, clutched in the talons of an owl.

“ ‘For auld lang syne’ means ‘for the sake of olden times.’ ” Amy’s voice was soft. “I wonder if that’s our life. Olden times.”

Ethan glanced sideways, caught by the sadness in his wife’s voice. She wasn’t one of those aggressively cheery people, but overall, Amy saw the existence of the glass itself as pretty amazing, whether half-full or half-empty. More than what had happened to their city, to their neighborhood, more than the terrorism or the riots, more than becoming refugees, that note in his wife’s voice brought home the weight of circumstances. Not just what was happening to them, but what was happening to the world.

He flashed back to something he’d heard on the radio the night the supermarkets had been stripped. The guy had been talking about the way stores were supplied, how everything happened in real time. Ethan could imagine the system to make that work, the scanners and computers and inventory management and logistics and shipping. Just one of a million plans that kept the world turning, a scheme as intricate and efficient as the vascular system that supplied a human being with blood.

But for all the efficiency of the vascular system, cut an artery and the body died.

Is that what the Children of Darwin had done? Was it possible that the madness engulfing Cleveland would spread, that power would fail widely, that food wouldn’t move from farm to store, that the police wouldn’t protect nor the hospitals heal?

Could life be so delicate?

You know that it can. The world worked because people agreed to believe it worked. He could hand a piece of paper to a clerk and walk out with clothing because they agreed to ascribe value to the paper. He could interact with people thousands of miles away and call it chatting. The d-pad in his pocket could access the sum total of accumulated human knowledge, from setting a bone to building an A-bomb.

And none of that was real. It was a shared and beneficial hallucination.

What happens when we can’t believe anymore?

“Everything will work out.”

“You don’t have to keep saying that for me,” she said sharply. “I don’t need to be managed.”

He started to protest, caught himself. “You’re right. Sorry.”

She softened, said, “Me too. Just tired.”

“Yeah. Your mom’s pullout couch never sounded so—” He broke off and stopped moving.

“What is it?”

“Do you hear . . .”

Engines. The sound, faint at first, grew rapidly louder. The night was quiet; they should have been able to hear a car for miles. Instead, it was as though . . .

As though they had been parked and waiting.

“Run!” Ethan grabbed Amy’s hand and pulled her off the road. Others had heard the sound too, and their flashlights whirled as they scattered, spots of brightness and blurs of color. The heavy pack bounced on his shoulders, and talons of fire clutched his knee as they sprinted up the entrance to the complex.

Humvees ripped around a bend in the road, their mounted spotlights turning night to day. A voice boomed over a loudspeaker, the words lost in screams and the roar of engines. Ethan didn’t waste any time trying to listen, just made for the cover of the model home, Amy half a step behind. His heart thumped his ribs as they pounded up the gravel drive and slid into shadow against the wall.

Violet had woken and was crying, and Amy’s face was pinched as she murmured, “Shh, no, not now, please, shh.”

Now what?

Peering around the edge of the building, he could see that the Humvees had split up, one holding the base of the road, two others swinging out to corral the refugees. The swiveling spotlights were blinding, and people froze in their beams.

“Do not run. We will fire. Get down on your knees and put your hands on your head.”

Would they really shoot? He didn’t know. If the government actually believed they might be terrorists, or infected with something . . . it was possible.

On the road, people were complying, setting down packs and blankets, kneeling on the blacktop. As the spotlights swung back and forth, they framed the huddled figures in light, throwing twisted shadows.

“Dr. Ethan Park. A drone has identified you on this road.”

His mouth fell open, and icy panic drenched his body. His hands tingled and itched.

A drone?!

Why in the name of everything holy would a drone be looking for him? Why would anyone?

“Put your hands on your head and walk slowly toward the vehicles, Dr. Park.”

“What?” Amy’s eyes were white with reflected light. “Why do they want us?”

He flashed back to the DAR agents who had come to see him, Bobby Quinn and Valerie West. The two of them asking about his research. That can’t be. It’s silly. “I really don’t know.”

“Should we turn ourselves in?”

He peered back around the edge of the house. Soldiers had dismounted the trucks, transforming the cheerful column into a huddle of terrified prey.

Near the middle, one man was still standing. It was the one they’d seen before, wearing flannels and carrying a rifle. His son knelt on one side of him, his wife on the other, her hands tugging his pant leg. Instead, he reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“Put your hands on your head, Dr. Park.”

“I’m not him,” the man yelled back. “We’re not him.”

“Get down on your knees.”

“I’m an American citizen. And I am not going back to Cleveland.” He started forward, ignoring his wife pulling at him.

“Sir! Get down on your knees, now!”

“We’re not who you’re looking for.”

“Drop the weapon and get down on your goddamn knees!”

“I have rights,” the man shouted. “I’m not a terrorist. You can’t do this.”

“Stop, you idiot,” Ethan whispered. “Get down.”

The man took one step, and then another.

A short series of detonations, flashes of brilliant light and booms that ricocheted through Ethan’s stomach like fireworks, only that couldn’t be, fireworks were in the sky, not on the road, and then the hunter’s back exploded.

For a second, the only sound was the echo of the gun blasts reverberating through the trees. Then the screaming started.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod,” Amy said, “ohmygod.”

People were standing now, starting to run. The loudspeaker boomed again, told everyone to stop, but hysteria had replaced fear. Ethan had a terrible image of the guns opening fire, strafing the crowd, but it was the spotlights instead, the soldiers hopping off the trucks and yelling.

Ethan grabbed Amy’s arm, squeezed hard. The woods were—

A sudden tapping sound made him jump. His first thought was that he’d been shot, but there was no pain, and the sound was too quiet.

It was the window of the model home, the one they were hiding behind. A woman held a flashlight in one hand as she opened the window with the other. “Quick,” she said, with a come here gesture.

He looked at her, a stranger in a tank top, her face twisted with urgency. Ethan grabbed Violet, pressed her into the woman’s arms, and then half boosted, half shoved Amy through the window. He gripped the edge of the windowsill and pulled himself up and over, the backpack making it awkward.

More gunfire sounded on the road.

The woman turned out to be named Margaret, and she was the wife of the guy Ethan had seen on the front porch, who now put out his hand. “Jeremy.”

The five of them were in the basement of the model home, a finished space designed to be a family room, though at the moment it held just a couple of folding chairs and a conference table. Outside, the loudspeakers boomed commands. He could imagine the scene, people being rounded up and zip-tied, loaded onto trucks. The soldiers would be ID’ing each of them, looking for him.

But why?

He didn’t know. Maybe it was the DAR; maybe it was whoever kidnapped Abe; maybe it was a mistake. Regardless, it seemed best not to be the name read over the loudspeakers. Hoping his wife would pick up on what he was doing, Ethan said, “I’m Will.” His middle name. “My wife Amy. And this is Violet.”

Amy didn’t miss a beat as she said, “Thank you for letting us in.”

“Of course, sweetheart.” Margaret shook her head. “I don’t know what those boys were up to, shooting at people, but I couldn’t let you stay out there. Not with the little one.” She cooed down at Violet, now back in Amy’s arms. “My lord, she’s precious.”

“You think the soldiers will search the house?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Wouldn’t think so. The doors and windows are locked, so no reason for them to think people are here.”

“We’re sort of caretakers,” Margaret said. “Watch over the place, make sure kids don’t come out to party, that kind of thing.”

Ethan said, “We won’t stay long. Just until they leave.”

“Nonsense. We’ve got plenty of room. It’s too late at night to be wandering around, especially with those soldiers all wound up.”

“You know the guy they were looking for?” Jeremy asked.

“No. We didn’t know any of those people. Just trying to get out of town, go stay with Amy’s mom in Chicago.”

Jeremy swiveled a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. They seemed to have run out of things to say, and in the silence, a Humvee engine revved. They all listened, heads cocked, as the sound grew fainter.

“We’ve got some food,” Ethan said. “It’s not much, but are you guys hungry?”

It was the strangest Thanksgiving he could remember, although there was something wonderful about it, too. Margaret and Amy worked together over the camp stove, heating cans, while he and Jeremy set the table. Paper plates and plasticware, a Coleman lantern in the center of the table. The man wasn’t much of a talker, but Ethan learned that they had two kids upstairs—“boys’d sleep through Judgment Day”—and that Jeremy also worked as an electrician, wiring the housing development.

Dinner was an odd mix: Campbell’s soup, black beans, jerky, peanut butter sandwiches. They all held hands as Jeremy said grace, and then everyone tucked in. Margaret kept up a steady stream of talk, all of it pleasantly inane. The food tasted better than it had a right to, and there were moments when Ethan forgot that they were huddled in a basement on the outskirts of a paralyzed city under terrorist attack and hunted by drones.

Afterward, while Amy checked on Violet and Margaret cleaned up, Jeremy cocked his head at Ethan in a come with me gesture. They went out to the front porch. The street was abandoned, no sign of the chaos that had taken place just hours ago. Almost no sign: Ethan thought he could see a dark stain on the concrete.

Amy was right. The life we knew was olden times.

“Listen, I want to thank you again,” Ethan said. “You saved us there.”

Jeremy nodded. “Wife’s got a big heart.”

“So do you. Thanks.”

The man stepped off the porch and reached behind a drain pipe. He came out with a pint bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the cap and took a pull, then sighed. “Margaret doesn’t like it, but sometimes a man needs a drink.”

“Amen.” Ethan took the offered bottle.

“She your first?”

“Violet? Yes.”

“Changes you, don’t it?”

“Changes everything.”

For a moment they stood listening to night sounds, rustling trees and the sigh of the wind. Ethan took another swig and passed the bottle back.

“It’s a good thing,” Jeremy said. “Fatherhood. I used to do roofing, up spreading tar in the heat of summer, no shade. By June my neck would have cracked and peeled and burned again. I was eighteen, thought that was hard. Then I had children.”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it? You think you know what you’re getting yourself into, but you have no idea. None at all. Everybody talks about all the overwhelming love, and that’s true, but that’s not really it. It’s the overwhelming everything. The idea that for every second of the next eighteen years, you’re responsible.”

Jeremy took another tip of the bottle, offered it. Ethan shook his head. The man capped the whiskey, then returned it to its hiding place. He stepped back up on the porch and put his hands in his pockets, looked up at the sky. “These are strange days, Will. Maybe the last days.” He turned. “You take care of that little girl, you hear?”

“I will. I’ll do anything I have to.”

“Hear that.” Back inside, Jeremy left them the Coleman, and everyone said their goodnights.

The moment Jeremy and Margaret were out of sight, his wife spun on him. “Okay, what the hell is going on?”

“Amy, I swear to God, I have no idea.”

“They knew your name. Knew that you were a PhD. They said there was a drone looking for you.”

“Yeah.” He bent to spread out the sleeping bag. Amy had already made a nest for Violet, and his daughter lay splayed on her back, arms and legs out, head to one side. “All I can think of is that it has something to do with Abe going missing.”

“So it was the DAR?” She frowned. “But if they wanted to talk to you, why wouldn’t they have just knocked on our door?”

“I’m wondering if they were watching the house, hoping whoever took Abe would come after me.” He sat down, unlaced his boots. “Only, we left, and that surprised them.”

Amy considered it. “But a drone? They must really want to talk to you.”

“I guess,” he said.

“You think they’re after your work.”

“Yeah.”

She settled onto her sleeping bag. “I know how much it means to you, baby. And I know how strict Abe is about his nondisclosure. But this is the government. The DAR. Maybe you should—”

“Right now,” he said, “all I care about is getting us somewhere safe. We’ll deal with the DAR after that.”

She nodded slowly, but she didn’t seem entirely convinced. He didn’t blame her. He wasn’t entirely convinced himself.

Ethan turned out the lantern, then crossed his arms behind his head and stared upward. Thinking of burning cars and a line of refugees. Thinking of fireworks and a spatter of blood. Thinking of how close he and Abe were, and whether their own government intended to steal their work from them.

The pistol in his waistband was heavy but strangely comforting.

For the sake of olden times.